Actually, it just depends on how you want to use it.

10th January, 2010

Since the Nexus One appeared towards the start of the year, I have basically spent all my time trying to convince myself to wait at least for the European model before I splash some serious cash on it.

Today I noticed a commentary on one TechCrunch’s blog posts about the Nexus One vs iPhone.

Now for those of you who may not be aware of the back story of TechCrunch and its love affair with Android, then at the end of July 2009 Michael Arrington “quit the iPhone” in a spectacular outburst of everything that’s wrong about the iPhone. Apparently it caused quite a stir in their office.

Yesterday, TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid came up with a post in my opinion correctly detailing why it will take you time to get used to the Nexus after using the iPhone for so long.

Danny Sullivan of Daggle countered with this impressive break down, clearly showing how in many cases Android needs you to do one or more option selections than iPhone to get stuff done.

Now this is all well and good, but only if you want all your options right there. This implies that there just aren’t that many buttons to press.

Take a look at this example provided by Daggle. In it they claim that it takes two button presses to start a new mail on Android, where it takes one on iPhone.

However, consider for a second you want to do something other than go back to your mailboxes, edit the mail currently visible, refresh or write a new mail - the only options available on the iPhone. If you wanted to quickly edit something on one of your mail accounts, then suddenly it is “just” two clicks on Android, and it’s Home button, wait for Settings to load, select Mail, select Accounts, then finally you can do something with it.

So my point is this - if you want to do simple stuff quickly, iPhone is great. But if you want to get into anything slightly more complex (which, as an extreme mobile phone power user, I regularly do), then it is basically a giant time consuming mess.

(As a footnote, iPhone’s Settings app and pages take an unforgivably long time to load)